As promised, Matthew Weiner left us with chills and a memorable sendoff: the famous Coke ad, the Coke account that Don Draper had just been offered, played us out of “Mad Men” in Sunday’s finale. Nice (fictional) work, Don. “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,” the jingle sang, as Don sang an “Om” at a California hillside spiritual retreat. It was, you might say, the Real Thing.

What worked: Joan’s choice of blossoming career over cushy retirement. Holloway-Harris, Joan’s maiden and married names, join to form her new company name. A feminist partnership. She rejects Richard’s offers, stating, “I would never make you choose.”

What didn’t work: Peggy and Stan proclaiming their love after all this time. It was the only moment that felt like a TV show wrap up.

By contrast, Roger and Megan’s mom are perfect together, noshing lobster while ordering in French (“champagne pour ma mere”). And Sally Draper taking charge of her younger siblings in the kitchen seemed quite natural. (Weiner has said no to spinoffs, but Sally tackling the 70’s would be a kick.)

James Spader is NBC’s touchstone for Thursday nights this fall, staying put as the network adds new dramas behind “The Blacklist.” NBC announced its 2015-16 primetime slate Sunday morning ahead of the “upfront” presentations to advertisers in New York tomorrow.

“The Blacklist” will be used to launch two new series, “Heroes: Reborn,” the spinoff of that popular drama, and “The Player,” from the producers of “The Blacklist.”

NBC’s other new dramas, “Blindspot” and “Heartbreaker,” will bow after “The Voice” on Mondays and Tuesdays, respectively. “Blindspot,” a conspiracy drama that opens with a woman (Jamie Alexander, above) covered in mysterious tattoos found naked in Times Square, is from prolific producer Greg Berlanti (“Arrow,” “The Flash,” who also landed “Supergirl” on CBS for fall).

NBC will be short on comedies, long on dramas for fall, with only two comedies making the cut. “Undateable” and “People Are Talking” are set for Fridays.

Besides Spader, the other boldface name on NBC’s lineup is Neil Patrick Harris, whose variety show, “Best Time Ever,” will air Tuesdays through November.

The 12th Annual State of the News Media report from the Pew Research Center is full of unsurprising data. Mobile media use is increasing, newspaper circulation is down, network and local TV news consumption is up and, so far, people looking for news online gravitate to the traditional TV network sites, and there’s not a lot of revenue coming from digital advertising.

Mobile is where it’s at. “39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers,” according to Pew Research Center’s analysis.

Network and local TV news consumption is up; cable TV news and newspapers, down. Newspaper weekday
circulation has now fallen 19% since 2004, Pew reported. At the network level, ABC and CBS revenue grew while that of NBC declined. ABC evening news revenues, based on data from Kantar Media, have now nearly caught up to NBC’s (nobody’s specifically mentioning Brian Williams).

The total median viewership over a 24-hour period for Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC combined dropped 7% in 2014 to 1.8 million; MSNBC suffered the worst decline.

The three commercial broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, rank among the top domestic news and information destinations online.

Podcast awareness is up, and not just because of “Serial.” For all types of media, significant revenues from digital advertising have yet to materialize. And one obvious headline: News Staff Salaries Stagnant in 2013.

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The brass at Gannett have had a brainstorm: or maybe it was a brain hiccup. As they split off the publishing branch of the company, the broadcast and digital division will be rechristened TEGNA.

That’s right. Some marketing/branding genius convinced the company to mix up some of the letters from the original name and rebrand as TEGNA. Per the announcement, “TEGNA will operate 46 stations Gannett currently owns or provides services to,” including KUSA-Channel 9 in Denver, as well as its digital unit.

I’m suggesting to higher-ups that the Denver Post now be known as The Vedner Tops. Sounds more modern, doesn’t it?

In a confusing sidelight, Gannet’s CEO said in a statement, “TEGNA is a nod to the more than 100 year-old history of Gannett.” Kind of half-a-nod. Introducing NAGET, GATNE, TANGE… oh, nevermind. Order the new signage.

By now the video announcing Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, released Sunday afternoon, has been dissected to death. Some commentators complained the two-minute, 18-second “Getting Started” video felt too much like an ad, perhaps for insurance or for America itself. Others said it was too close to Reagan’s “morning again in America.”

A careful look and listen reveal what the Hillary Clinton campaign announcement video was missing. Yes, it was an ad. That was the point. And comparisons to Reagan can only help HRC.

What I noticed most was what was absent: the lack of a voice-over-narrator signaled a profound shift. The carefully crafted video relied on people (not actors) talking, followed by the candidate herself. No traditional, typically male, voice-of-God announcer telling us what we were seeing. That was a canny and surely intentional change, and something that might have been missed if you weren’t listening across the history of such ads. For Millennials, “traditional” translates to “old fashioned” and the Clinton media managers cleverly avoided that sense while invoking good old fashioned American values.

A new study by TDG Research finds “cord cheaters” are everywhere, in surprisingly large numbers. Almost one-fifth of subscription streamers use the passwords/credentials of someone outside their household.

“While it is widely acknowledged that ‘cord cheating’ is occurring, few comprehend how widespread the behavior has become,” noted Ft. Collins-based Michael Greeson, TDG Founder and Director of Research.

Whether offspring in a college dorm using a parent’s HBO account or an office-mate piggybacking on a Netflix account or a neighbor “borrowing” access to the Dish Sling TV service, it feels like “everyone’s doing it.”

In my experience, some networks are more concerned about this than others: certain premium cable networks just want a larger viewership and don’t much care who trades passwords; others consider it cheating. TDG’s point is that “content providers are losing substantial revenue by not enforcing more restrictive authentication procedures.”

More than 20% of adult broadband users that stream video from an online subscription service are ‘cord cheaters,’ the report says.

When radio was young, Ray Durkee’s “Sunday at the Memories” was a vibrant nostalgia show, a hit launched at Denver’s KHOW and eventually syndicated to more than 100 radio stations nationally. The local ratings were huge, even beating a Broncos broadcast.

“Be bop a lula”… news of the Hindenburg disaster… “The Shadow knows”.. an old Jello commercial…Running from 1973 on KHOW, the show combined vintage music with news and sports clips, bits from old movies, popular radio DJs, old time radio shows, commercials… all immersing the listener in the past.

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Durkee’s son James is now digitizing his late dad’s reel-to-reel tapes, posting a sample online, inviting downloads, and talking to a couple of local stations (other than KHOW) about a reprise. Eventually he’d like to get the show syndicated again. The archive is vast: three hours a week for 10 years. He’s up to show No. 16.

“The hope is to make it available on the air again,” he said. He’s justifiably proud of the national fan base for his father’s show. “Ray was to Sunday what Casey Kasem was to Saturdays.”

James himself was a Denver radio personality, working the overnight shift at KBPI from 1988-91. The first 12 “Sunday at the Memories” are available for download.

Before Ray died in 2009, he asked James, “Is the World Wide Web for audio?” Clearly, he had an inkling that the internet would be the next stop for his work.

The Oscars, with first-time host Neil Patrick Harris, saw its ratings drop to a six-year low on Sunday. (ABC/Craig Sjodin)

Sunday night’s Academy Award telecast drew a huge audience, but not as huge as in past years. In fact, it marked a six-year low. The Neil Patrick Harris-hosted Oscars 2015 on ABC Feb. 22 drew 36.6 million viewers and a 10.8 rating in the key demographic, adults 18-49. Last year’s telecast drew 43.7 million viewers and a 13.1 rating in that demo.

The fact that smaller films were nominated this year — the winner “Birdman” and “Boyhood,” the other frontrunner — accounts for most of the drop.

We’ll have to see whether ABC’s kiss-off to affiliates contributed to a decline in the local 10 p.m. news ratings: following the Oscars, a network promo for “The Goldbergs” featured Wendi McLendon-Covey (“Bridesmaids”) as Beverly Goldberg, talking directly into the camera, telling viewers, “It’s over. Turn it off. What are you still doing here?” The encouragement to quit before local stations’ late news may have been taken to heart.

The KMGH newsroom, for one, wasn’t thrilled.

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The ABC comedy “Fresh Off the Boat,” premiering Feb. 4, (at 7:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on Channel 7, bracketing “Modern Family”), is the first Asian-American comedy since Margaret Cho’s late, lamented “All-American Girl” two decades ago. It packs a bigger wallop than the average half-hour purporting to be inclusive or to showcase “diversity.” Trading in sight gags, silliness, stereotypes and stinging prejudice, it’s a study in the power (and timidity) of the medium. And, by virtue of its Asian-American cast and concerns, it’s more radical than you think.

Sure, the show is superficial fun as a Taiwanese couple uproot their family from Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown, to the lily white suburbs of Orlando, Fla. The humidity is bad for her hair, the supermarket looks like a sanitized hospital, the vapid women on the block all look alike, mom Jessica (Constance Wu) complains. (She figures the loud blonde is “their queen.”)

Yet here we have an epithet for an Asian, “chink,” uttered on broadcast TV within a show about the fear of The Other and the challenge of fitting in. The meanness of kids in a school cafeteria — a familiar topic in films and TV series for years — gets a culture-clash twist. (After an embarrassment, the son begs his mom for “white people food.”) Asians are seeing themselves onscreen for the first time in 20 years and sometimes it’s not pretty. Progress? Yes and sometimes uncomfortable.

Making good on the network’s promise to add specificity to characters, the focus is on Eddie (played by Hudson Yang), an 11-year-old hip-hop fanatic. The Asian-American lover of hip-hop bonds with a white kid over black music, as an African-American kid pronounces the whole scene “crazy.” Obvious, perhaps, but the moment marks the country’s changing demographics. And, not least, the marketing world’s awareness of shifts in buying power.

Modeled on noted chef Eddie Huang’s memoir, the series feels very of-the-moment. It won’t be the hit of the year, but “Fresh Off the Boat” is worth a look. And it could lead to more efforts to explore Asian-Americans onscreen — before another 20 year absence.

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.